Subject: THREE LEGS

From: [email-masked] (Jim Mcnelly)
Date: Sun, 19 Feb 1995 00:07:00 +0600

J. Mead replies to my original note:

References: <[email-masked] 

JM>> If we look at the notion of "Rural Community as Ghetto" where the
JM>> youth > is taught that the "real world" is away from their culture,
JM>> the flight > of minds from the farm is just as real as the flight
JM>> from the inner > city.

JM> Some flight is economically healthy.  Other cultures found that
JM> primogeniture was the only way to maintain farms of a size that
JM> returned enough benefit (economical and all others) to keep people
JM> on the farm. When farms were split, eventually people could not
JM> survive, let alone economically or emotionally prosper.

I agree that splitting farms leads by definition to subdivision, but I 
suggest that there may be a form of land aggregation other than 
agribusiness assimilation, one that is community or co-op based, rather 
than necessarily familial.

JM> I don't know where you farm, but I can assure you that around here
JM> there is very little social interaction among farmers unless it
JM> revolves around the business.  

While I have lived in a rural setting much of my life, and 
environmental contracting has taken me to many communities, I work as an 
environmental consultant and project manager, specializing in organic 
matter conservation and utilization. I consider composting to be 
farming, and have an understanding of agronomics and farm culture. 
Working from an operations perspective, with extensive experience in 
operating heavy equipment, I believe that I have a "farm sense" level of 
equivalency. I agree that most farmers, especially those I meet at Ag 
shows have little social interaction with each other; and this is one of 
the problems I am trying to address. How to increase the sense of 
community among the farming community?

Yes, people meet for lunch on auction
JM> day, but school and church activities are increasingly centralized
JM> in towns and dances and similar social events are once a year
JM> fund-raisers, if that.  Many people live on the farm and socialize
JM> in their choice of a group that probably orients on a larger town.
JM> The small town orientation too often is the local tavern or a church
JM> setting that some find restrictive.

This contrasts with Amish and other religious communities, where 'Barn 
raisings' are still common. These cultures not only share resources, 
but interact closely. I am not suggesting farm communes, but a farm 
culture that is more interactive. I have known truck farm, 
horticulture, and retail oriented farm aggregations that have a great 
deal of socialization; where people work together in groups over ten 
individuals. This contrasts with the migrant farm labor community, 
which has its unique culture as well. 

My ideal is to find ways to integrate farm product consumption with 
production, rather than have the impersonal "commodity" buyer and 
processor interacting between the two. Local self reliance "off the 
commodity grid" is the ideal I am trying to articulate. 

JM>> the joy is removed from rural living. Farming becomes > like a
JM>> factory job, a risky one often paying poorly at that.

JM> If you dont' treat it like a business, it will.  If you treat it
JM> like a business, it needn't.  It is possible to enjoy a businesslike
JM> farm just as one can a hobby or lifestyle farm.

I agree that any agricultural enterprise must be profitable, and I 
regret any insinuation that farming as it is currently practiced is 
drudgery or impractical, or that only hobby farms can be fun. But we 
should both agree that profitability must take into consideration the 
sustainability of the enterprise. The price of pollution, erosion, or 
loss of the supporting community over years or generations at the 
expense of short term profit is too great.

JM>> They feel > and smell the chemical and greed infusion into the
JM>> community. It is no > wonder that they want to flee the country to
JM>> escape to suburbia. At > least there they can control the landscape
JM>> around their homes and partake > of nature in city parks. > 

Yes,
JM> most of us don't care to have other people telling us what we can do
JM> with what we believe to be ours, just as urban residents feel their
JM> yard is basically their own.  We all make compromises, but sometimes
JM> not happily.

Let us take wetlands for an example. Years ago it was common practice 
to drain wetlands and make them productive. I just read an article in 
the local paper today about farmers complaining that protecting wetlands 
removes the "profitability" from the land. The comeback of waterfowl 
over the past forty years as a result of reclaiming wetlands and 
protecting what is left has created great benefits, both economically 
and aesthetically.

>From my travels and discussions, I am concluding that the "Bottom Line 
is bottoming out". People are not solely concerned with financial 
numbers and are placing increased value upon otherwise abstract "quality 
of life" factors. Just as a community or farm can quantify its acreage 
and productivity, it can also measure value in trees, clean water, clean 
air, habitat, and serenity. Are not these values capable of being 
quantified as well? I would like to think that long term value can be 
measured in terms of the value or survivability of a resource for future 
generations. Yes a wetland may be fine today, but has it been protected 
for generations to come as well?

JM>> What quality of life was > represented by the great Mississippi
JM>> watershed flooding of 1994? 

JM> I find organic matter beneficial, but I'm not growing a forest with
JM> 7% matter.  I'm growing corn and work hard to keep it over 3%.  Most
JM> popular tillage methods used around here do that.  It is the old
JM> methods of 20 years ago that reduced organic matter.

True, there has been great progress in the US regarding improving 
tillage practices, crop rotation, and erosion control. I see much of 
farming as you describe as treading water, however, rather than 
regenerative. After attending several sustainable agriculture 
conferences over the years, and serving on a USDA "Quality of Life" task 
force, I am convinced that the farm community needs new biological tools 
to become more organic matter self sufficient and productive. You wrote 
earlier about the need to ensure profitability, I would add that 
increasing organic matter levels in the soil is an indicator of 
productivity.

Regarding my association of flooding with the loss of organic matter, I 
refer to the change in flood plain calculations by the Corps of 
Engineers as a result of the change in farming practices. Most flood 
plain estimates are based on flood levels from pre 1920 benchmarks. 
This was largely before our loss of organic matter and the resulting 
loss of earthworms and soil porosity. Yes there would have been a flood 
in 1993 in the Mississippi watershed, of which I live near the 
Mississippi in Minnesota, but it would not have been so severe.

JM> I'm averse to using any kind of waste from large systems like towns
JM> because if I make a mistake and accept heavy metals, it is
JM> irreversible. I'm so concerned about that that I dont' know the
JM> circumstances under which I'd accept the chance that some sewage
JM> system operator might make a mistake that I'd pay for with my farm.

As a person who has been involved with programs which have spread 
literally millions of tons of organic material from "large systems", I 
can understand your concern. Not all waste treatment facilities are 
equal, nor are the operators all trustworthy. I have long worked to 
ensure that regulations exist to make biosolids not just safe for use in 
farm land, but highly beneficial. I see a retrogression as more "mixed 
solid waste" composting operations try to use farms as thin landfills 
for ground up garbage masquerading as compost. 

Awareness on the part of the farm community is a key issue. But 
indirectly, you are making my point. I believe that the farm should be 
the *processor* of municipal organics, not just the "disposal site". 
Along my point of the producer and consumer working together, it must 
begin in the area of organic residuals management. Even the fact that 
organic matter is called "waste" is a sign of how far we have to go in 
changing public perception. 70% of material thrown into the landfill is 
organic, and I call that a lost resource.

JM> I have my animals deposit manure on the fields where they graze, and
JM> if that is mismanagment, I guess I'm guilty.  The levels are so low
JM> there is no run-off danger even in a gully-washer.  How would you
JM> improve this method of manure management?  It is the way it's been
JM> done for millenia.

You are right. In my composting guidebooks which I have written for 
several states, and in nearly every seminar I conduct or speak at, I try 
to point out that nature does not compost, she mulches. The natural 
process, as you point out, is for organic residuals such as leaves, dead 
plants, animal droppings etc. to be deposited layer by layer each year, 
for earthworms and soil organisms to do the decomposition.

Humans are fastiduous creatures, however, and are prone to make piles, 
not layers. Once a pile is made, composting begins. Piles left to sit, 
especially large ones, are what is creating the problems with non 
point pollution. If we are going to make piles, we should learn to 
manage them properly. I recently read statistics from Minnesota which 
stated that out of 37,000 livestock operations, around 16,000 were out 
of environmental compliance. This is roughly one third. Of those 16,000, 
only around 5,000, or less than one seventh were an immediate threat to 
water quality. 

So we are talking about simple techniques like spreading manure more 
often, not burying animal carcasses, turning manure piles occasionally, 
not spreading on frozen ground with too great a slope, avoiding 
stockpiling in 25 year flood plains, and other simple practices.
 
JM> People who keep talking about a way of life might
JM> be in danger of romanticizing farming beyond what it is, and
JM> projecting farmers by the label into some unrealistic set of
JM> expectations which in effect indentures them to pursuing an
JM> unrealizeable, unrealistic goal.

That is a fair criticism. I believe in the nobility of all work, and 
the separation of people from the biological resources around us is 
endemic of all walks of life. When I seek to get urbanites and farmers 
to find more ways to relate and work together, the burden is not on the 
producer any more than it is on the consumer.

JM> I applaud people who have noble expectations of farming, and
JM> encourage them to come out and by a few acres and live and grow on
JM> it.  There is land for sale.  And then they can farm as they'd like
JM> me to farm and can share in the same rewards.

There is a 'back to the land' movement, but alas it is largely a quest 
for escape from the hustle and stress of the city, not a return to the 
land to farm. But from interviews of people seeking the rural life 
style, they claim to be looking for *community*, not just an occupation. 
Perhaps this social angst might be the basis for the agri-cultural 
revolution I idealize.

JM> Incidentally, if you're closely reading the farm press, you already
JM> know that the potential for another farm crises is here.  No crop in
JM> '93 and a cheap crop in '94 has hurt a lot of farmers who were just
JM> crawling out of the debt problem of the '80s.  Some won't survive.

As an amateur climatologist, I also see long term problems as a result 
of climate change. Climate dependent agriculture will also lead to a 
shift in farm and lifestyle practices. Again, sustainable, not 
commodity based agriculture, or renewable carbon versus fossil carbon, 
will survive.

Mr Compost~~~

Jim~ McNelly
[email-masked]

 * RM 1.3 02460 * God wants spiritual fruits, not religious nuts

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